Mudville

There is no joy Chez Kamata today. After winning the quarterfinal game, my husband's team lost the semi-final. If they'd have won, they'd have been able to go to the All Shikoku tournament (not Koshien, as previously reported; you'd think I'd have that straight by now, having been a baseball widow for ten years or so). In this morning's newspaper, there was a photo of the scene immediately after the game - the victors, running forward with their arms raised; the losers and their coach standing in the background, heads drooping. Yoshi felt that the photo constituted harrassment of him and his players. I thought, from a journalistic point of view, that it was a great photo that told the whole story, but I managed to sympathize with him.

In somewhat related news, I finally got my contributor's copies of Skipping Stones, featuring my inspired-by-a-true-story story, "Baseball, Dad and Me." It was written from my son's point of view, about how his dad's team lost the prefectural championship a couple years ago by one lousy run in the tenth inning. Interestingly, the illustrations are of a little girl playing baseball with her dad. Politically correct, yes, but the story was actually about Jio.